65.7

An American Dream. New York: Dial, 15 March. London: Deutsch, 26 April. Novel, 270 pp., $4.95.

Dedication and acknowledgment: "To Beverly and to Michael Burks; an appreciation to Anne Barry, Richard Baron, Walter Minton, Harold Hayes, Donald Fine and not least, Scott Meredith". Mailer's fourth wife, Beverly Bentley, is the woman pictured on the dustwrapper of the first edition. Rpt: First appeared, in a different form, in Esquire, January–August 1964 (64.2–64.9); partial in 98.7. See 63.13, 65.3, 65.5, 65.9, 65.11, 70.4, 70.14, 83.6.

Mailer:

“ It's a novel of suspense, not of intellectual action. I wanted an intellectual for a hero who was engaged in 32 hours of continuous action and so did not have time to cerebrate. But the only idea in An American Dream (it is the idea which I think makes the book so repellent to some reviewers) is that love is the one human condition we never capture without paying an extraordinary and continuing price. This is certainly not a new idea. But it is desperately out of fashion now, and besides — I did my best to pose this lone idea in as vivid and unendurable a manner as possible. (65.11) ”

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  Cover of the first edition.

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  Paperback.

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  Paperback.

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  Paperback.

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  Paperback.

Bibliography

Reviews

• Aldridge, John W. (March 19, 1965). "The Big Comeback of Norman Mailer". Life. p. 12.
• Bersani, Leo (1972). "Interpretation of Dreams". In Braudy, Leo. Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. pp. 120–126.
• Didion, Joan (April 20, 1965). "A Social Eye". National Review. pp. 329–330.
• Epstein, Joseph (April 17, 1965). "Norman X: The Literary Man's Cassius Clay". New Republic. pp. 22, 24–25.
• Hardwick, Elizabeth (Spring 1964). "Bad Boy". Partisan Review. Vol. 32. pp. 291–294.
• Hyman, Stanley Edgar (1972). "Norman Mailer's Yummy Rump". In Braudy, Leo. Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. pp. 104–108.
• Poirier, Richard (June 1965). "Morbid-Mindedness". Commentary. pp. 91–94.
• Wolfe, Tom (March 14, 1965). "Son of Crime and Punishment, or: How to Go Eight Fast Rounds with the Heavyweight Champ and Lose". Washington Post. Book Week. pp. 1, 10, 12–13.

Essays

• Broer, Lawrence R. (2016). "Meta-Modernism in An American Dream". The Mailer Review. 10 (1): 99–116.
• Fetterley, Judith (1986). "An American Dream: 'Hula, Hula,' Said the Witches". In Lennon, J. Michael. Critical Essays on Norman Mailer. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co. pp. 136–144.
• Glickman, Susan (1982–1983). "The World as Will and Idea: A Comparative Study of An American Dream and Mr. Sammler's Planet". Modern Fiction Studies. 28: 569–582.
• Gordon, Andrew (1980). An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer. London: Fairleigh Dickinson UP.
• Langbaum, Robert (Fall 1968). "Mailer's New Style". Novel: 69–78.
• — (1969). The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer. New York: NYU Press.
• Lennon, J. Michael, ed. (2004). Norman Mailer's Letters on An American Dream, 1963–1969. Sligo Press.
• McKinley, Maggie (Fall 2012). "Mailer's Modern Myth: Reexamining Violence and Masculinity in An American Dream". The Mailer Review. 6 (1): 158–169.
• Millett, Kate (2016) [1970]. "Norman Mailer". Sexual Politics. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 314–335. ISBN 9780231174251.
• Solotaroff, Robert (1974). Down Mailer's Way. Urbana: U of Illinois P.
• Tanner, Tony (1971). "On the Parapet". City of Words: American Fiction 1950–1970. New York: Harper & Row. pp. 344–371.